The ancient Egyptians tended to consider both their immediate and more remote neighbours either as excellent sources of luxury trade items and slaves, at times of political power and strength, or as uncivilized forces threatening to destroy and overwhelm the Egyptian Nile Valley. This was true not only of cultures within Africa; those in the Aegean, the Levant, Cyprus and Mesopotamia also were viewed from one or the other perspective, occasionally both at the same time. All these, together with Nubia and Libya, have received much scholarly attention and, whilst we probably will never fully understand their ancient relationship to Egypt, we have a fairly good idea, ‘hearing’ the story from both sides when surviving evidence allows, what their attitudes towards each other were at various times in their history.

This article deals with what is surely the least investigated aspect of ancient Egyptian relations with its neighbours, simply because we know comparatively little about the two major successive cultures concerned – Punt and Aksum – in the ancient world.

Pressed by rival imperial powers and financially weak herself, Portugal initiated in the 1890s an experiment in governing large areas of Mozambique cheaply through the means of two chartered companies, the Companhia do Niassa and the Companhia de Moçambique. This experiment proved doubly unsuccessful. In the first place the two companies failed to provide the development capital for Mozambique ardently desired by Portugal's government. Instead, they devoted their energies to maximizing profits through the systematic exploitation of the African populace. Secondly, the fact that shares in these companies could be purchased by private persons led foreign governments, notably those of Britain and Germany, to use these companies as proxies to further their own imperial interests at Portugal's expense. Only with the corning to power of António Salazar in the late 1920s did the Portuguese government feel powerful enough to move against the anachronistic chartered companies and terminate the experiment.

The dramatic urban change taking place on the African continent has led to a renewed and controversial interest in Africa's cities within several academic and expert circles. Attempts to align a growing but fragmented body of research on Africa's urban past with more general trends in urban studies have been few but have nevertheless opened up new analytical possibilities. This article argues that to move beyond the traps of localism and unhelpful categorizations that have dominated aspects of urban history and the urban studies literature of the continent, historians should explore African urban dynamics in relation to world history and the history of the state in order to contribute to larger debates between social scientists and urban theorists. By considering how global socio-historical processes articulate with the everyday lives of urban dwellers and how city-state relationships are structured by ambivalence, this article will illustrate how historians can participate in those debates in ways that demonstrate that history matters, but not in a linear way. These illustrations will also suggest why it is necessary for historians to contest interpretations of Africa's cities that construe them as ontologically different from other cities of the world.

The export trade in wild rubber occupies an important place in the nineteenth-century economic history of the Gold Coast and Asante, and the impetus which it gave to the future economic development of the country was greater than is commonly recognized. The timely development of this new product by African entrepreneurs and up-country producers in the 1880s enabled the colony to diversify its export bill at a time when flagging prices for palm products and dwindling supplies of ivory, monkey skins, and surface gold threatened economic stagnation. Between 1884 and 1898 Gold Coast rubber exports registered a twenty-five fold increase in volume, thereby placing the country among the top five rubber producers of the world.

An analysis of the Gold Coast rubber trade contributes to the demolition of certain myths concerning the economically passive role of West Africans in the development of their own hinterlands. European agencies—whether mercantile or governmental—contributed only indirectly to the development of the local rubber trade. No doubt the general protection and opportunity for exercise of individual initiative which the British colonial government provided enabled the Gold Coast to escape the excesses of forced labour and expropriation which marred European concessionaire rubber operations in other parts of Africa. But it was chiefly the myriads of African merchants, middlemen and producers who supplied the driving force of the local trade during the nineteenth century.

The rubber trade accelerated the pace of economic change in Asante and other interior states where the pull exerted by the sea-borne export sector previously had been minimal. It is clear that the number of people involved in trading generally—whether as middlemen or producers—increased greatly as a result of the lucrative returns to be gained from rubber tapping. With rubber trade expansion came a growing demand by producers for a wider range of European merchandise imports, plus the acceptance of a uniform metallic currency which facilitated market transactions throughout the interior. Finally, the profits saved from rubber tapping became an important source for indigenous capital investment in cocoa-farming, particularly in Asante.

The African rubber boom, which lasted from 1890 to 1913, had a significant economic and political impact on many parts of Africa. While the broad outlines of the boom were determined by the world market, the numerous local and regional variations were influenced more by the depletion of the rubber supplies. The factors that influenced the depletion varied according to whether the region in question was a free trade area or a concession area.

The end of the notorious concession companies in the Congo Independent State has generally been attributed to the efforts of English and Belgian reformers. Recent research on Abir, a major Congo concession company, has revealed that attempts at reform were ineffective, and that exhaustion of the of the rubber supplies had caused the rubber system in the Abir concession to break down by 1906, when serious debate on the Congo question was just beginning in Europe.

The article shows how the Abir system, which was designed to constantly increase production, led to depletion of the rubber resources. When the depleted areas merged, the territory passed into a period of crisis during which Abir lost control and production plummeted. Production figures for other Congo concession companies suggest that events in their territories followed a similar pattern.

The main historical problem to which Professor Curtin addressed himself in the Census relates to the total number of slaves imported from Africa into all the slave-importing Atlantic regions during the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade. The estimates of the Census put the total number at 9,566,000. It is conceded that the actual number may be either somewhat lower or higher. But Professor Curtin concludes that ‘it is extremely unlikely that the ultimate total will turn out to be less than 8,000,000 or more than 10,500,00’. After examining Professor Curtin's methods of computation and the quality of the data employed, these confident limits were found to be unwarranted and misleading. The evidence relating to the size of the slave populations of the importing regions and to the demographic processes among the slaves suggests very strongly a substantial upward revision of the import estimates of the Census, especially those for Spanish, Portuguese and French America. An estimate of British slave exports from 1750 to 1807, on the basis of hitherto unused records, points to the fact that unless complete shipping data are employed in the slave export estimates the numbers computed will continue to be far below the actual numbers.

Throughout the twentieth century the British Colonial Office sought to limit the severity of corporal punishment and to regulate more closely its use in the colonies. This article has looked at one aspect of that policy involving the African Colonial Forces. Most military officers argued that corporal punishment was essential to maintain discipline, especially in times of war or active service. The Colonial Office sought to limit severely the circumstances in which corporal punishment could be administered but accepted that its use should be retained or revived during the two World Wars.

In the Second World War the arguments for retaining corporal punishment for African soldiers were increasingly denounced by officials and various humanitarian lobbies. African Colonial Forces had come under direct War Office control in September 1939 and during the war many African soldiers served overseas alongside British and other units; they also constituted part of an imperial order which, so propaganda increasingly proclaimed after the fall of Singapore, was opposed to racial discrimination. Corporal punishment based on racial terms was out of kilter in the war and was maintained only at the insistence of senior military men. Once the war was over the Colonial Office ordered that this ‘relic of discrimination’ should be ended.

Only recently have historians devoted much attention to monetary developments in African history, primarily because the substantivist school of economic anthropology, which has argued that so-called western economic theory does not apply to African situations, has dominated the field. This view has been increasingly under attack in recent years, particularly by a new group of economic historians who have found many aspects of formal economic theory useful in the reconstruction of Africa's past. Marion Johnson's pioneering work on the gold mithqal and cowrie shell, for example, has documented the spread of a common currency over much of West Africa, throughout an area encompassed by Lake Chad in the east, the upper reaches of the Senegambia in the west, the southern Sahara in the north, and the region between the Volta basin and the Niger Delta in the south. The study of other currencies, including the copper rod standard of the Cross River basin in Nigeria and Cameroons, and the cloth money of the Senegambia, has demonstrated the importance of other standards besides cowries and gold, so that it is now known that virtually all of precolonial West Africa had economies sufficiently developed to require the use of circulating mediums of exchange and units of account. This breakthrough raises a number of important questions which seriously challenge, if not completely undermine, the predominant view that Africa's past, down to very recent times, has been subsistence oriented, non-market directed, and basically static.

Using new evidence on the British, French and North American slave-carrying trades, this article seeks to revise Lovejoy's recently published estimates of the levels of slave exports from West and West-Central Africa in the eighteenth century. The figures suggest that Lovejoy's estimate of the total volume of slave exports from the west coast of Africa to America between 1700 and 1810 was probably reasonably accurate, being only 8 per cent lower than the total indicated here. However, the new data reveal temporal and coastal distributions of slave exports that differ substantially from those proposed by Lovejoy. In particular, they suggest that previous work significantly understated levels of slave exports between 1713 and 1740, and again in the 1760s and 1770s. Contrary to earlier findings, in fact, it appears that slave exports from the west coast of Africa to America in the decade prior to the War of American Independence were very similar to levels attained after 1783. Furthermore, in terms of coastal distributions, it seems that the Bight of Biafra and West-Central Africa, particularly the Loango coast, contributed much more substantially to the slave traffic to America during the early decades of the century than was previously assumed. These revisions of Lovejoy's figures have important implications for movements in slave prices in Africa and for assessing the demographic effects of the trade on the slave-supplying regions. In addition, they help to improve our understanding of the relationship between the slave trade and changes in sugar and other commodity production in America during the eighteenth century.

One of the most important changes to take place during the early colonial period was the transformation from slave labour to free labour. In French West Africa this resulted not from a policy decision by the French administration but from the massive departure of slaves in those societies most reliant on slave labour. The focal event was an exodus from Banamba, a Maraka town which had been a major centre both of the slave trade and of the exploitation of slave labour. During the period before the Banamba exodus, tensions were building up within various slave societies, tensions that reflected themselves in a gradual filtering away of slaves and in occasional slave revolts. The French were generally afraid to deal with these tensions and limited themselves to stopping the slave trade while reinforcing allied élites, most of whom were slave owners. There were three major factors in the exodus:

(1) Massive enslavement during the late nineteenth century created large reservoirs of slaves who were homogeneous and remembered a free state.

(2) The closing-off of recruitment pushed slave-owners to exploit slave labour more systematically.

(3) With the end of warfare and the opening of new opportunities in the cities and in the Senegambian peanut fields, slaves had increasing opportunities to go elsewhere.

Mrs Barbara Ottaway has proposed that the interquartile range of the radiocarbon dates available for a given industry will provide an estimate of the floruit of that industry. The present paper examines some four hundred radiocarbon dates which have so far been processed from Iron Age sites in Bantu Africa, and concludes that the intersextile range provides a more accurate approximation for the floruit of individual industries than does the interquartile range. This approach permits the presentation of a more precise inter-regional synthesis of Iron Age chronology than has previously been attempted. It is demonstrated that the earliest manifestations of the Early Iron Age Industrial Complex are in East Africa. Further to the south, two distinct streams of the Early Iron Age are recognized: that in the eastern part of the sub-continent had penetrated as far to the south as the Transvaal some centuries before the western stream spread into what is now Zambia. The inception of the later Iron Age, around the eleventh century A.D., is shown to have been at least as rapid as was that of the Early Iron Age.

In view of the greater precision which the above methodology imparts to the radiocarbon-based chronology, a brief discussion is presented of the calibrations which dendrochronological studies provide between radiocarbon ages and calendar ages. It is concluded that, for the period of the sub-Saharan African Iron Age, the corrections which are called for are minor in comparison with the standard errors of individual radiocarbon dates; and the application of such calibrations to Iron Age dates is not recommended.

Unprecedented wartime demands by Britain and the U.S.A for strategic minerals from abroad, coupled with the loss of valuable sources of supply in Eastern Europe and South East Asia to the Axis, greatly enlarged the volume of production and the pace of economic change in the mineral-rich zones of Africa. But the sharpest upsurge in output, which helped rescue a number of African export economies from the slough of depression, coincided with British rearmament several years before the war broke out; and production in most instances reached a crest two or three years before the war ended. In one sense the mineral regions of Africa between 1937 and 1945 provided a supreme example of the old mercantilist credo that colonies existed primarily to buttress the economies of the metropole in time of war. From another perspective, the war strengthened the hold of powerful multinational corporations on African mineral development and accelerated the absorption of new mining areas and labour supplies into the world capitalist system. A wide range of African metallic and non-metallic ores played a vital – and in some cases an indispensable – role in the Allied victory in 1945. But for the African peoples and countries most directly involved, the wartime upsurge had an uneven impact. Wage increases were in no way commensurate with the increased workloads nor with the pay scales for European miners. Except in the Union of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, where greater agricultural and industrial diversification was already in train, the expansion of the mining industries perpetuated enclave development. The reliance of the industrialized West on African strategic minerals during the war was a prelude to the even greater production boom and dependency of the Cold War period.

This article investigates the role of African colonial employees in the functioning of the colonial state in French West Africa. Case studies from the 1890s and early 1900s demonstrate that in the transition from conquest to occupation, low-level African colonial intermediaries continually shaped the localized meanings that colonialism acquired in practice. Well-placed African colonial intermediaries in the colonies of Guinée Française and Soudan Français often controlled the dissemination of information and knowledge in the interactions of French colonial officials with local elites and members of the general population. The contributions of these African employees to the daily operations of the French colonial state show that scholars have long overlooked a cadre of men who played a significant role in shaping colonial rule.

This article opens with a retelling of colonial accounts of the ‘mania of 1911’, which took place in the Kamba region of Kenya Colony. The story of this ‘psychic epidemic’ and others like it would be recounted over the years as evidence depicting the predisposition of Africans to episodic mass hysteria. This use of medical and psychological language in primarily non-medical contexts serves to highlight the intellectual and political roles psychiatric ideas played in colonial governance. The salience of such ideas was often apparent in the face of increasing social tension, charismatic leadership and a proliferation of East African prophetic movements. This article addresses the attempts by the colonial authorities to understand or characterize, in psychological terms, a progression of African ‘rebellious types’ in society that often took the form of prophets and visionaries, but were diagnosed as epileptic, neurotic or suffering from ‘religious mania’.

This article, which extends and modifies the analysis offered in an earlier article in this journal (1977), examines what is known of the organization of the supply of slaves for the trans-Atlantic trade in Dahomey, with particular emphasis on the relative importance of local slave-raiding and the purchase of slaves from the interior, and on the evolution of a group of private merchants within Dahomey. It is argued that initially the kings of Dahomey sought to operate the slave trade as a royal monopoly, and relied exclusively upon slave-raiding rather than purchasing slaves from the interior. From the mid-eighteenth century, however, Dahomey did seek to operate as a ‘ middleman’ in the supply of slaves from the interior, and since its kings did not normally attempt to control this aspect of the trade this involved the emergence of a private sector in the slave trade. Although merchants in Dahomey were in origin state officials, licensed to trade on behalf of the king or ‘caboceers’ (chiefs), they subsequently acquired the right to trade on their own account also and thus became in some measure independent of the state structure. The autonomy and wealth of the merchant community in Dahomey were further enhanced by the transition from slave to palm oil exports in the nineteenth century, when leading merchants moved into large-scale oil production, using slave labour supplied by the king. There were recurrent tensions between the monarchy and the merchants over commercial policy and over the monarchy's expropriatory fiscal practices, and the conflict of interests between the two was exacerbated by the development of the oil trade, undermining the solidarity of Dahomey in the face of the European imperialism of the late nineteenth century.

Archaeological investigations in southern Mauretania have revealed a wealth of rather spectacular stone masonry villages which were occupied by prehistoric cultivators as early as 1000 B.C. It is argued that the inhabitants of these villages were Negro and very probably Soninke, and that the basic elements of their culture had developed without major influences from outside the area. The apparent sophistication and complexity of this cultural manifestation, combined with the close fit of developments in this area with Carneiro's theory of state formation, suggests that this prehistoric complex represented at least a powerful chiefdom which embodied many of the characteristics of subsequent West African states. The first demonstrable outside influences in the area began about 600 B.C. with the arrival of Libyco-Berbers from North Africa. Rather than causing still further cultural advances, the initial effect of this contact was the collapse of this sociopolitical organization. But with subsequent adjustment, plus the potential from trans-Saharan trade carried out by the North Africans, the basic, pre-existing pattern re-emerged, resulting eventually in a second and much more powerful African political organization in this area – the Ghana Empire.

An inventory of ethnolinguistic units on the Guinea coast can be drawn from early written sources, that is, from Portuguese and other European records of between 1440 and 1700. When this inventory is compared with the present-day inventory it is found that, in the particulars cited, the units have remained very much the same for three, four, or five centuries. Summary evidence relating to the coast, section by section, from the Senegal River to the Cameroons River, is presented, and this includes reference to the linguistic evidence provided by early vocabularies. Not only do all earlier units correspond to present-day units, but the sequence of units along the coast is the same in the earlier as in the present-day inventory. However, some of the units have expanded or contracted; and one of the modern units (Mende) is not recorded before 1700. It is finally suggested that research into the documented period of continuity, through study of the written records, should precede attempts to evaluate the accounts of Völkerwanderungen supplied generously in oral traditions.

Social control of trypanosomiasis in African history deserves further study. The pioneering work in this field is John Ford's respected but neglected The Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology (1971). While Ford's arguments have received support from recent findings in immunological, epidemiological and epizootiological research, they have rarely met with evaluation or engagement, either in historical or scientific literature. Historians have tended to describe trypanosomiasis control as a matter of avoiding contact with tsetse fly. In so doing they have implicitly rejected the position of Ford, who regarded infrequent contacts between tsetse and mammalian hosts as necessary for the maintenance of host resistance. Ford believed that host resistance, rather than avoidance of tsetse, was the basis of trypanosomiasis control. The historical nature of Ford's work requires that a satisfactory evaluation of The Role of the Trypanosomiases make use of historical, as well as scientific, data. The evidence of trypanosomiasis and cattle-keeping from one region of north-eastern Tanzania supports Ford and suggests that other explanations of trypanosomiasis control are inadequate. The Tanzanian evidence shows that precolonial societies coexisted with, but could not avoid, tsetse. They could not eradicate tsetse because scarcity of water prevented permanent occupation of large areas. Tsetse and trypanosomiasis did not prevent cattle-keeping, but helped to keep the region's cattle population low and confined it to relatively densely settled neighbourhoods. Social control of trypanosomiasis collapsed during the pre-Second World War period of colonial rule. Economic and political developments were primarily responsible for a series of famines between 1894 and 1934. Famine-induced depopulation allowed steady spread of tsetse and wildlife reservoirs of trypanosomes into formerly cultivated areas which had been free of tsetse before the colonial period.

Depuis la synthèse précédente, les recherches archéologiques se sont développées et diversifiées en Afrique Centrale.

Pour la préhistoire, des recherches prometteuses sont effectuées sur les processus géomorphoiogiques au Congo, ce qui permettra de mieux comprendre les problèmes posés par l'interpretation des vestiges découverts dans les formations sableuses.

Du Gabon à l'Angola, on assiste à un intérêt croissant pour les vestiges des populations qui exploitent la zone littorale depuis l'âge de la pierre récent et qui sont responsable de nombreux amas coquilliers.

A l'intérieur du continent, au Congo et au Rwanda, une série de nouvelles dates se rapportent à l'âge de la pierre récent, sans qu'il soit possible de préciser les limites temporelles de ces industries.

Dans la moitié sud du Cameroun et à l'est de la Centrafrique, divers témoignages indiquent que depuis au moins le dernier millénaire avant notre ère cette partie de la forêt etait occupee par des populations sedentaires, utilisant de la ceramique, des haches polies et pratiquant sans doute une forme d'agriculture.

La fonte du fer semble débuter dans la région de Yaoundé vers le quatrième siècle avant notre ère. A l'est, au Rwanda et au Burundi, la métallurgie du fer paraît au moins aussi ancienne et l'on ne peut tout à fait exclure qu'elle soit même beaucoup plus ancienne, mais cela reste controversé. Au Congo, un fourneau pour fondre le fer a pu être daté du cinquième siècle de notre ère, tandis qu'un fourneau pour fondre le cuivre était daté du treizi`eme siècle de notre ère. Au Zaïre, dans la région du Shaba, la fonte de ces métaux remonte au quatrième siècle de notre ère.

Enfin, des séries systématiques de datations permettent d'esquisser durant l'âge des métaux les bases d'évolutions régionales au nord Cameroun, en Centrafrique, dans la cuvette centrale au Zaïre, et au Rwanda.

Concern about desiccation – the effects of deforestation on climate and soils – was an early and pervasive theme in colonial science, present at the onset of West Africa's colonial era and with roots in previous centuries. As a set of scientists' ideas linked to soil and forest conservation policy, the impact of desiccationism was initially muted, struggling unsuccessfully in nascent administrations with more pressing political and administrative agendas. But by the end of the colonial period it can be argued that anxiety about desiccation had become a cornerstone of development practice and state penetration. This article uses a case study to consider the transformation of the status of the ‘science’ of desiccation within colonial development agendas, the responses this transformation eventually provoked and its enduring legacy.

Our reflections here complement what has, in West African studies, become a general consensus about shifts in colonial forest policy. From the outset, many colonial administrations – both francophone and anglophone – were concerned both about the effects of forest loss on climate, hydrology and soils, and about the effects of ‘irrational and wasteful’ exploitation of forest as an economic resource. But early policy imperatives to establish reserves either failed to reach the implementation stage or could not be implemented due to the resistance they engendered, both from populations and indeed from agricultural or political administrations. A significant phase of reservation, at least in West Africa's humid forest and transition zones, began only in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and was pursued until the mid 1950s by colonial states which increasingly gained the strength to impose unpopular policy despite resistance. From this perspective, and given that nationalist sentiments in pre-independence struggles were often pitted against repressive colonial forest services, it could be hypothesized that independence would bring regimes more responsive to local concerns and more likely to heed resistance. Yet such a view, focusing simply on state capacity in changing political contexts, overlooks qualitative changes in the configuration of science-policy relationships within the state, a reconfiguration that it is necessary to grasp if we are to understand how post-colonial forest policy was less a rupture than a continuation or, indeed, reinforcement.